Bøger i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture serien

The Victorian Male Body' examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality.

[headline]Rethinks the relationship between architecture, literature and (in)visibility in the nineteenth-century city Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls 'invisible architecture'. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period. [bio]Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is the author of Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 (2023) and Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal. His work has appeared in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in various handbooks and edited collections.

This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

Investigates the latent and manifest traces of the East in Pre-Raphaelite literature and culture.

This book offers an extensive investigation of the life and multi-faceted career of Florence Marryat (1837-1899) the much feted Victorian novelist, editor, actress and public orator.

Provides an reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. This book examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures.

Explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson. This book enquires into the problem of venerating artificiality and the inaccessibility of beauty associated with it whilst engaging in the sensuous, immediate experience as it is advocated by Walter Pater. It examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This is understood through the shift from Aestheticism to Decadence, which is marked by a greater emphasis on heterodox erotic experience. This study examines Wilde's early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexed non-encounters. Key Features The first monograph study to focus exclusively on Decadent poetry Gives original attention to Oscar Wilde's poetry which has been relatively neglected Makes an explicit distinction between 'Aestheticism' and 'Decadence' Includes a Coda which considers how this Decadent poetics transmutes in Modernism. Kostas Boyiopoulos is Teaching Associate at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. His main research specialisms are fin-de-sicle literature and culture, Decadence and Aestheticism, and Anglo-Continental literary transactions. He is a co-editor of The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and, with Mark Sandy, of the forthcoming essay collection Decadent Romanticism (Ashgate, 2015). He has published articles on late Victorian and Modernist topics.

Examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in a period of heightened mobility Women's experiences of locomotion during a period of increased physical mobility and urbanisation are explored in this monograph. The 5 chapters analyse Victorian and early Modernist texts which concentrate on women in transit by train, including Wilkie Collins's No Name, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton and The Wings of the Dove, and stories by Rhoda Broughton, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Dickens and Katherine Mansfield. They highlight the tension between women's boundless physical, emotional, and sexual aspiration - often depicted as closely related to the freedom and speed of train travel - and Victorian gender ideology which constructed the spaces of the railway as geographies of fear or manipulation. Key features: The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British and European context Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and philosophical writings Proposes a reconceptualization of the public/private binary

Provides an innovative approach to articulate what 'underground' meant to the Victorians The construction of London's underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London's answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of mile Zola's underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This study explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but as a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pages of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The way in which these writers negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces reveals both the emergence of Gothic, socialist, and modernist sensibilities, and the way all modern cities deal with what is unseen, intangible and inarticulable. The inclusion of illustrations of Victorian maps, cartoons, photographs and art bring the period to life. Key Features: An interdisciplinary study that explores Victorian maps, guidebooks, cartoons and advertisements, alongside literature, journals, photographs and art to bring the period to lifeDraws on modern critical frameworks of Derrida, Lefebvre, and Kristeva to recover and to conceptualize the lost spaces of the Victorian cityRedefines 'underground' beyond its spatial usage to look at the emergence of underground revolutionary movements in fin-de-sicle LondonArgues for the distinctiveness of London's underground culture and its influence on other global cities

Explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. It also considers the dynamics between form and thought at the fin de sicle, contextualizing its comments in terms of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and others, to offer a fully integrated account of the intellectual cultures and currents in this period. Key Features:Boldly reassesses Pater's intellectual significance, arguing that he self-consciously poised on the cusp between late-Victorian Romanticism and ModernismImaginatively combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'Provides the most substantial scholarly engagement with Pater's unpublished manuscripts (held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Examines the Reading Room of the British Museum as a space of imaginative and historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London Drawing on archival materials around this national library reading room, Roomscape is the first study that integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own and the legions of feminist scholarship that uphold this spatial conceit. Susan David Bernstein argues not only that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf's feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, individual events, Roomscape considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered dimensions of literary production. In addition to new perspectives on George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Virginia Woolf, Roomscape offers original research on other novelists, poets, and translators including Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Looking at the Reading Room of the British Museum as a networking site for a variety of readers, this study examines political radicals and women activists who found a transnational community in this London public space. An appendix of notable readers lists details of more than 200 women readers who registered for admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum from the middle of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.

Explores the lasting cultural and political impact of the events of this remarkable yearOscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and its disastrous repercussions dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895, but as this innovative study reveals, the Wilde scandal was by no means the only event to capture the public's imagination that year. Freak weather, a flu epidemic, a General Election, industrial unrest, 'sex novels' and New Women, trials of murderers and fraudsters, accidents, anarchists, bombers, balloonists and bicyclists were all topics of interest and alarm. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation's morals? Were overpaid foreign players corrupting English football? Could cricket save a degenerate nation from moral ruin?Drawing on strikingly diverse primary sources, Nicholas Freeman examines the recurrent preoccupations of a turbulent year, showing how 1890s' Britain is at once far removed from our own day and yet strangely familiar.

The great polymath William Morris and his contemporaries and followers - from H. Rider Haggard to H. G. Wells - are the focus of this study. Anna Vaninskaya draws widely on primary sources to explore the many ways Victorians and Edwardians talked about community and modernity.

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres (the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel) using Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction, Lady Audley's Secret, as a starting point

By connecting Fenian and anarchist violence found in popular fiction from the 1880s to the early 1900s with the avant-garde writing of British modernism, Deaglan Donghaile demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and modernism were directly influenced by the explosive shocks of late nineteenth-century terrorism. For the first time, late-Victorian 'dynamite novels', radical journalism and modernist writing are brought together in provocative readings of Henry James, R L Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Wyndham Lewis. Key Features*Extensive original archival research from libraries in the UK, Ireland and the US*The first book to examine types of political and literary disruption*Reads Henry James, R L Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in new contexts *Detailed discussion of Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde Vorticist journal BLAST in chapter 4

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought

This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items.

This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty.

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? 'Artful Experiments' seeks to approach the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge.

Dickens and Demolition examines how tropes, characters, or extracts from Dickens' fiction were repurposed as a portable terminology in arguments for large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in London during his lifetime.

This study explores lyric poetry's response to a crisis of relevance in Victorian Modernity, offering an analysis of literature usually elided by studies of the modern formation of the genre and uncovering previously unrecognized discourses within it.

Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, Nasser examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.

Argues against the repeated emphasis on literary form and for the artistic importance of literary contentIt is natural to assume that if works of literature are artistically valuable, it's not because of anything they say but because of what they are: beautiful. Works of art try to say nothing, to use their content only as matter for realizing the beauty of complex form. But what if appreciating the things a work of literature has to say is a way of appreciating it as a work of art? Often dismissed as too lengthy, messy, and preachy to qualify as genuine art, in fact Victorian narrative challenges our conceptions about what makes art worth engaging.Key Features. Appeals to those interested in philosophy and literature, especially the philosophy of literature. Brings together thinkers from the analytic and continental traditions in aesthetics. Contains an updated and expanded version of the award-winning essay 'In Defence of Paraphrase'. Makes a case for why Victorian literature and Victorian moral thought are worthy of attention. Offers new readings of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Augusta WebsterPatrick Fessenbecker is Assistant Professor, Programme in Cultures, Civilisations and Ideas at Bilkent University.

Without a consideration of periodical poetry, Victorian poetry studies is quite simply anachronistic

Uncovers the link between Ruskin and the tradition of the aesthetics of space Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth century. With chapters devoted to the ways in which aesthetic and decadent writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde built upon and challenged Ruskin's ideas, the book links the late Dickens to the early modernism of Henry James. The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature gives a vibrant vision of what an aesthetically sensitive treatment of these spaces looked like during the period. Giles Whiteley is Reader in English Literature at Stockholm University.

This book analyses how Victorian novels and plays used the actress, a significant figure for the relationship between women and the public sphere, to define their own place within and among genres and in relation to audiences.